Phantom
by Charis M
Summary: Dead by his own hand and she haunts him like a ghost.


_Notes: not mine, just playing in this sandbox for a bit._

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><p>In his nightmares he relives that day, over and over: finding Anne standing over Thomas, the blood blooming on his younger brother's chest, the knife clattering from her nerveless fingers as her wild-eyed gaze met his. She had been pale, trembling, her gown of blue silk crumpled and torn, but he saw nothing but the blood and the blade before rage and pain and guilt took over.<p>

It is a lord's right - a lord's duty - to be judge and jury and executioner. It is his blade that sends her to her death in turn.

They bury Thomas in the family cemetery with full rites, as befits a nobleman and a good son of the Church. As he watches the last of his family laid to rest, Athos feels something harden inside him. He realises that day he no longer belongs in la Fère.

He buries Anne himself, on the hillside beneath the tree where they had first met, as if the good memories of their beginning can hold at bay everything wrapped up in the end.

~ x ~

He loses himself in the bottle in the months following their deaths, and knows nothing else for a time. If he dreams of her in the wine-dark haze, he mercifully does not remember.

~ x ~

_Bless me, father, for I have sinned ..._

"It was no sin," says the priest, when he goes to confession after, speaking of what happened in halting, hesitant words. "You did your duty, my lord, and God commends those who do what must be done."

He emerges from the confessional feeling ill and unsteady. It is the first day he goes up the hill to the tree. Spring rains and summer sun have wrought the changes nature does to all things, and he can no longer see precisely where he dug her grave.

He imagines, though it is not their season, that he can smell forget-me-nots heavy in the air.

~ x ~

Had nothing changed, that fall would have been their first anniversary. He celebrates it by getting so thoroughly drunk he can't even remember his own name. That night, for the first time in months, he dreams of her.

He wakes to a mouth dry and thick as cotton wool, a head that throbs at the slightest motion, and cool fingers stroking his brow. When he cracks his eyes open just a hair she is looking down at him, her smile gentle, soft. The air is heady with the perfume of the flowers twined into her loose dark curls.

"You're dead," he moans and shuts his eyes again.

"Yes," she agrees, but her touch is still there.

~ x ~

He leaves la Fère soon after. The ghost of his wife haunts his waking moments, and he cannot bear to be in that house any longer - jumping at shadows, yelling at the terrified staff, drinking just to get through the day without seeing Anne there out if the corner of his eye, smelling her perfume in every room he enters. He slashes her portrait to ribbons but it does nothing to ease the pain.

"You're dead!" he screams at her the night before he leaves for Paris. "Why won't you leave me alone?!"

"You know why," she murmurs, but when he hurls his glass at her it just hits the wall behind and shatters against the stone. In despair, he reaches for the bottle instead.

~ x ~

Paris is mercifully quiet, and he can believe that he left her buried on that hillside and begin, in some small way, to heal. The Musketeers give him an anchor, the brotherhood providing unsought a family that slowly replaces the one he'd lost (killed, buried) back at la Fère. He still drinks, but less, focuses on what is instead of what was, and tries to move on.

He wakes on the morning of what would have been their second anniversary to a small blue flower on his pillow, but there is no sign of her. He crumples the flower in his fist and tosses it into the midden, and manages to convince himself that it was never there.

He drinks more, but it does not affect his work - Trèville is heard to comment that even when mostly drunk Athos is the best swordsman in the regiment by far - and no one speaks of it.

~ x ~

She returns to him three years to the day of the eve of her death.

He opens the door to find her on his bed. Her dress is white this time, save for where the blood has stained the neckline, and the pale line of her throat is marred by the ghastly red of a knife slash. He remembers - suddenly, vividly - the feel of her life's blood spilling over his fingers.

When he comes back to himself from retching into the chamber pot, she's there beside him, her fingers soothing as they brush his shaggy hair back. "You've grown weak in my absence, husband," she breathes in his ear, and he fights a shiver at the tickle of her breath.

"You're dead," he says stupidly. It seems to be the only words he can find in her presence these days.

A phantom kiss brushes his temple. "Go to sleep," she says, almost fond.

He dreams of her again that night, hazy sweet recollections of being curled together in their marriage bed, but when he wakes the floor is hard under his cheek and his muscles are stiff and he reaches for his wine.

~ x ~

"Why?" he asks, in the small hours of the morning, when it's particularly bad and three bottles have yet to make her vanish.

"Because you deserve this," she replies. Tonight she is in the dress he found her in that day (the dress he killed her in, buried her in) and the blue silk is ripped and crushed and stained with blood, hers and Thomas' both.

"So did you," he says, a little defensively, and she just looks at him and he wonders that her clear green eyes can be so opaque.

~ x ~

"You drink too much, my friend," Aramis says when he and Porthos find him in a tavern the third year after he's joined the Musketeers, the fourth year to the day from when he had married Anne. "One of these days it will be the death of you."

Athos ignores him and reaches for the half-finished bottle of wine. There is still a flicker of forget-me-not blue out of the corner of his eye; he has not drunk enough yet.

~ x ~

"You're a fool," Anne says, as she leans against the bars of his cell when the priest has gone. She is luminous in the dimness of the prison, and he is completely sober for the first time in years and looks at her closely. The edges of her shape blur into the shadow, and he can see just the faintest hint of the stones behind her, but she is otherwise no different from their days together. He wonders how much he has changed; some days he scarcely recognises himself in his shaving mirror. "How much longer do you think you can continue like this?"

"As long as I must," he says, suddenly recalling Aramis' words from months before. Suicide is a mortal sin; his penance has been to go on living, but it would be so much less painful if it were all to end. This burden has grown unimaginably heavy with the years.

When they lead him out into the courtyard the next day, and he stands bound looking down the barrels of half a dozen rifles, he inhales deeply and catches the sweet smell of flowers over metal and leather and gunpowder.

He closes his eyes and waits.

_~ finis ~_

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><p><em>End Notes: At one point I wanted to play with AU prompts for a variety of Musketeers frameworks, and braindumped a bunch of possibilities to go through later when I couldn't find any kind of AU bingo card or anything like that. This particular prompt, which became the summary, somehow twisted into this fic on the notion that Athos drinks not just to forget, but because if he drinks enough Anne's ghost vanishes. I don't even know.<em>

_I have such a thing for these two, both separately and as a pair, for which I blame the musical wholeheartedly. The BBC series has just made it worse. XD_


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